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Re: Upstream violates GNU GPL?



On Monday 15 December 2008 11:48:58 Sergei Golovan wrote:
> So the questions are: Are my suspicions correct, and ejabberd upstream
> indeed violates GNU GPL, or am I wrong? If they are then which is the
> best action to do (Should we continue to distribute ejabberd and
> therefore promote it? Should I contact FSF with this question?)?

Just a comment: if the upstream authors actually own all the copyrights 
(e.g. there are no 3rd-party contributors), they can legally release any 
sort of binaries, etc, even if no one else can. However, even if this is 
the case, releasing artifacts without source in this manner is bad form.

As far as Debian is concerned, we don't use the binary installer, we use the 
source. So I don't think this is a Debian issue, and I don't think Debian 
should care what other things the upstream is doing. But I think it's a 
Free and Open Source Software Community issue and members of that community 
(including individuals involved with Debian) ought to work with upstream to 
help them acknowledge and rectifty the situation.

-- 
Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net> <xmpp:wjl@icecavern.net>
OpenPGP FP: 4135 2A3B 4726 ACC5 9094  0097 F0A9 8A4C 4CD6 E3D2

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